Steve Blow Is Going to HATE This New Blog

It’s called The Science of Cities, and it’s about science, and cities, and urban growth, and data, and (projecting here) how much about what we’ve assumed about such things the past five decades is wrong wrong wrong. Recommended, probably.

The problem is that all of the things that these modern urbanist folks now say is wrong, wrong, wrong, were promoted by their mid-20th-century predecessors, wh were absolutely convinced that they were right, right, right. You know, the ones who promoted the I-345 overpass to replace the streets named Pearl Expressway and Central Expressway (not to mention Good-Latimer). They gave us the Downtown Tunnel system (which killed street level retail for 30 years). They gave us Woodall Rodgers as a moat separating Downtown Dallas from what is now Uptown. They gave us the ring of highways around Downtown that complete the circle of the Downtown Fortress. They tried to give us Roseland Parkway and Crosstown Expressway, but thankfully were thwarted.

In fifty more years, some revisionist “experts” will decry the New Urbanism of the early 21st Century. In fixing what is wrong with our infrastructure, the first rule should be to keep from making it worse. Going back to the street patterns of 1970 in this area would make it worse.

Hup Hup

What I learned today: Steve Blow is key to DMag’s SEO strategy.

Ted

But this new blog is fortified with science and three other essential urban oils. It says so right there on the label.

Wylie H Dallas

It seems to work pretty well in the rest of the developed world. The U.S. infatuation with highways is an outlier in both time and geography.

Ted

I’m with you, Wylie. There’s not a day I wake up not hoping the U.S. has physically turned into the Netherlands overnight while I slept. But what do I get instead? Eurasia, same old vast and pointless sea to shining sea, giant, oversized states like Texas, so ridiculously far from sensible lil Rhody.

And don’t get me started on why we Americans couldn’t have implemented the sensibly dense, post-automobile urban planning most of Europe achieved well before America was even a dream.

Alexander

Have you been to theNetherlands recently? The infrastructure is amazing. We could be so lucky to have that budget.